We were in the upper reaches of Brays Bayou, past where the stream is bridged by Interstate 45 and dead in the heart of Houston. Brays is an urban stream, subject to all that goes with that.

Historical records indicate the Brays Bayou of the mid-1800s was a winding, tree-shaded stream with numerous wide sand bars on the inside of the bends and a thriving, diverse fishery in its rich, green water.

A spotted gar Brays Bayou shows the effects of a discarded rubber band that somehow found its way around the fish's body and slowly cut into the fish as it grew. (Shannon Tompkins / Chronicle)

Today, it has been channelized and straightened, and even seen its banks and bottom lined with concrete. It’s basically a drainage ditch.

Instead of being bracketed by a riverine forest of oaks and ash, willows and hackberry, sycamore and hickory, the channel is rimmed mostly by industrial sites, homes, apartments, businesses and the occasional park, cemetery and golf course.

Concrete rubble along with a mishmash of unidentifiable metal and plastic long ago replaced limbs and aquatic vegetation as the dominant aquatic “habitat.”

Truth is, shopping carts were the most common “structure” we saw in the stretch of Brays the scientists sampled.

The water? It was a thick, green syrup from which rose a stench very much like being downwind of a landfill.

That water bore on its breast and suspended beneath its surface the burden of its urban surroundings. Uncountable numbers of plastic bags. A procession of molded foam cups and pieces. Beer cans and bottles. Plastic of every shape and size. Unidentifiable things. Disgusting things.

A carp collected from Brays Bayou shows the horrible and eventually fatal effects of somehow becoming encircled by a tight-fitting, discarded rubber band. As the fish grew, the band sawed into the fish's body. It would have soon sliced into the fish's body cavity. (Shannon Tompkins / Chronicle)

Even in this fetid and fouled place, fish find a way to survive. As unlikely as it might seem to some, the bayou holds a surprisingly diverse fishery, including decent populations of species many might not expect to live in a drainage ditch in the middle of the fourth most-populous city in the nation.

The scientists collected many largemouth bass from the bayou, including several fish in the 2-3-pound range. They also found a smattering of sunfish. And lots of catfish.

Blue catfish were the most common, and there were some big ones. When the electrofishing boat was “zapping” one are, a blue cat that might have weighed 30 pounds or so rolled up and disappeared before it could be netted.

The bayou also yielded good numbers of other species – juvenile menhaden, spotted gar, striped mullet and an assortment of non-native species such as Asian grass carp, common carp, Rio Grande perch and armored catfish. We didn’t collect any tilapia at the survey location, but have caught them there in the past.

(An aside: the most productive “habitat” in the waterway – the spots where scientists caught the most fish – was around the clusters of submerged shopping carts.)

For the most part, the fish looked amazingly healthy, given where they lived.

But a couple illustrated how these urban fish face dangers not seen by their relatives in more rural waters.

“Look at this,” Bill Balboa said as he removed a Brays Bayou spotted gar from a gill net.

Fisheries scientist Bill Balboa handles one of several largemouth bass collected from Brays Bayou during a recent collection effort on the urban waterway. Despite its much degraded state, the bayou holds a surprising number of fish, including bass, sunfish and a lot of blue catfish. (Shannon Tompkins / Chronicle)

Balboa, Galveston Bay ecosystem leader for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s coastal fisheries division, held the fish in a gloved hand and poked at something strange on the gar’s mid-section.

“It’s a rubber band!” he said.

Sure enough, somehow the cylindrical-shaped gar had gotten a rubber band tightly cinched around its midsection.

The tight rubber band was cutting into the fish’s body; it had already sawed into the gar’s underside, despite the fish’s thick covering of armor-like scales.

The incident of the gar slowly being cut apart by a discarded rubber band might have been filed away as just a freak occurrence if not for what Balboa found a few feet farther down the net.

“Look at this one! Unbelievable!” he said.

It was a common carp which also had run afoul of a rubber band. Somehow, the carp had the misfortune of getting ensnared by the band which snugged diagonally from just behind its head to behind its pelvic fin.

The band was cutting the fish apart, sawing into the carp as the fish swam. The rubber had sawed a deep gash across its right side, through the muscle and almost into the body cavity.

That the carp had, so far, survived this wound and seemed otherwise in good health was amazing. But it was doomed, eventually, by the random piece of trash.

Balboa, who has handled thousands of fish over his career, said he’d never seen anything like it.

No one onboard had.

When you’re a fish, a lot of things can kill you.

When you’re an urban fish, “death by trash” appears to be a surprisingly common one.

8 Responses

You might be surprised.
While boating up Brays Bayou to the collection site, we saw a handful of people fishing in the waterway. Most were under bridges, using them for shade in the June heat. They seemed to be targeting catfish, and didn’t look like the catch-and-release crowd.
Would I eat a fish caught from Brays Bayou?
Not unless I had to.

I wondered, too.
The bands had hardened and stiffened, more like plastic than pliable rubber. They were brittle, but not so much that they crumbled.
It didn’t seem to make sense that a simple rubber band could do that kind of damage. But the evidence was right there in our hands.
I’ve seen fish with plastic six-pack holder “collars” around their bodies. But I’d never seen one with a rubber band around it.

Yes. And, after being measured, both fish were released back into the bayou.
The only fish not released were the invasive alien species.
By the way, Texas law prohibits anglers or anyone else from releasing alive invasive fish listed as harmful or potentially harmful. By law, anyone taking a grass carp, tilapia, armored catfish or other fish designated as harmful or potentially harmful must immediately eviscerate the fish.
The only exception is on waters where a valid, state-issued Triploid Grass Carp Permit is in effect. On those waters (where non-reproducing grass carp have been stocked for vegetation control), any grass carp captured must be immediately released.

Those rubber bands probably lasted because they were in water. But what was shown did not suprise me (except, I didn’t expect to see fish harmed by rubber bands) because some cattlemen use rubber bands to cattrate &/or dehorn cattle. They are special bands, but not so different from office type bands except for being smaller in overall diameter.
Back a number of years ago, when Houston had the coldest weather in decades, I walked White Oak Bayou and several drainages ditches running into it. This was in the Jersey Village & Winchester Country area. I saw thousands of exotic fish, mostly tiliapa, that were killed by the cold. Some places, they covered a 3 ft wide drainage ditch from side to side for hundreds of feet.

I’m always amazed by the variety of fish and other life in and around the waterways of Houston. I’ve adjusted a lot of my sport fishing to enjoy what we have here in the city, for those times I don’t feel like driving an hour or more to fish a more rural setting.
It always pains me, as well, to see the amount of garbage that is in the water.
Thanks for the article highlighting the effects of thoughtless littering.